Let’s make good news

Don’t you just love getting good news? Or at least a sliver of good news, like we received last week when, amidst global death and destruction, Cyril Ramaphosa finally arrived, in all senses, with his natty purple tie neatly Windsor-knotted, and he spoke, and he spoke well, and a nation blue from holding its breath could at last exhale.

Yes, good news – we really should seek out more of it. It’s good for the blood pressure, and it’s good for the soul.

And too much bad news leads to the drawbridge going up; it leads to despair.

So I was interested to read that The Guardian newspaper, my favourite paper – after the one you’re currently holding in your grubby mitts, of course – has started a policy of actively hunting out good news alongside the bad.

The scheme began quietly about 18 months ago when the editor, Katharine Viner, initiated a pilot project to see how readers would respond to articles about “good things happening in the world”.

It turns out people were hungry for good news, starving even.

“Reader numbers for this kind of journalism have proved remarkably robust,” says the newspaper, adding “almost one in 10 readers shares the story on social media.”

The aim is to “develop ideas that help improve the world, not just critique it”, as Viner says.

Now, being Pollyannaish helps nobody, obviously, but being proactive, doing something instead of simply bemoaning the way things are, is the only way forward. Anything else is stagnation. So how are things? Well, Cyril did a pretty fine job of telling us in his first State of the Nation address.

And Africa Check – one of my favourite websites – did a pretty fine job of fact-checking what he said. Mostly his figures were bang on, which is good to know, except for the fact that he was sadly right when he said “poverty levels rose in 2015”.

The truth is 55.5% of South Africans live below the poverty line, which means below R992 a month.

And then 25.2% live in extreme poverty, surviving on less than R441 per month. That’s not just a number: that’s 13.8 million of our countrymen. It’s desperate but, as Viner says, “despair is another form of denial”.

So let’s own it; let’s now work together across party-political lines to make it better: South Africa, let’s make good news.